‘The old dive master chewed on the grit in his mouth, the grit that was in all of their mouths, that was forever in everyone’s mouths.’

He gets straight to the action; it didn’t take long before a sense of imminent danger had my pulse racing. You know that ‘don’t go in there’ stress you feel watching a horror movie? That. And lots of it. And it only intensified as I raced through the book forgetting to breathe.

And, just like in Wool, Howey leaves every section on a cliffhanger that made me want to keep reading ‘just one more’ page.

Oh and the footnotes? I think they’re a quirky touch. Howey includes a couple of dozen of them, defining each new word he uses for a relevant property of sand. I guess he was showing us that in a world filled with grit, grain and involuntary crunch, we’d have at least 300 words for the stuff, much like the eskimos proverbially do for snow.